The Facial Recognition Technology Is Known to Have Gained a Foothold in Many Industry Verticals and It Keeps on Continuously Charting New Ground. Odds Are Facial Recognition Apps Can Become a True Power Booster for What Is Now a Pretty Staid Area of Marketing, - Non-Digital Marketing
Facial Recognition has gained so much traction in an entire host of verticals and applications (according to Variant Market Research, its market is expected to be worth some $ 15.4 billion by 2024) that most anyone, regardless of the kind of business they are in, should look into whether the technology could come in handy in reaching their business objectives.
In part, this is owing to the ability of the Facial Recognition technology to better equip and advance the field of expertise known as Marketing, - something universal and vastly important for most industries. Moreover, Face Recognition can make a dent in precisely those areas of Marketing, where the now rampant Digital Marketing falls short, or simply becomes irrelevant. What are those areas, how much headway has been made already and what are the potentialities one should be aware of?
Looking to Develop a Robust and Well-Performing Face Recognition App?
The Marketing Functions the Facial Recognition Technology Can Support and Promote
One of the first occurrences of Face Recognition merging with Marketing took place at a company called Expedia. The company provides one of the world’s most well-known online travel platforms. They smartly employed the Facial Recognition technology to create personalized travel experiences for their Hawaii-bound travelers. By using Face Recognition to determine the emotions, images of the various travel itineraries and spots in Hawaii invoked, they began to identify those of them that resonated with a specific website visitor the most.
Facial Recognition will obviously find a number of marketing-related applications, associated with emotional intelligence, within the Digital space. However, while the ability of the Facial Recognition technology to not only determine user emotions, but also to influence buying decisions as part of a Digital Marketing strategy leaves no doubt, the technology’s impact on what is referred to as brick-and-mortar retail can be far greater than it seems at first glance. In fact, in this area, Face Recognition can become one of the very few meaningful Marketing innovations we have seen in years, or, even, decades.
Facial Recognition in Brick-and-Mortar Retail and the Restaurant Business
Identifying the More Frequent Customers for Marketing Purposes
First and foremost, you can identify regular customers of your brick-and-mortar store (or is it a restaurant?) and offer them discounts or additional perks. This can help encourage customer loyalty both among those who have visited your store just a few (say 3-5 times) and those, who visit you more frequently, but don’t just bother to obtain a discount card and can be persuaded to obtain one to start visiting you on a more regular basis.
Determining How Suitable a Store or Restaurant Location Is for Business
By giving you the ability to count the actual number of customers, visiting each of your physical stores, a Facial Recognition app will enable you to identify the reason for sluggish sales, or, conversely, an uptake in your business, - it is just your store’s location, or are there any other factors (such as, for instance, your employees, working hours or branding) at play here?
Actually, Facial Recognition apps can be of immense assistance to the proprietors of supermarkets and restaurant chains even prior to when they set up store in a new location. When installed sufficiently in advance to when your business opens, such an app will tell you how suitable the public, visiting the spot, are for reaching your business goals. At the very least (although, there could be some other ways of doing this), you will simply be able to understand if there are enough folks in the area at a certain hour of day or night to make the sales you anticipate.
Facilitating Product Promotion in Multiple Ways
The ability of Facial Recognition software to determine a person’s sex and age helps one adjust one’s product offering accordingly and makes the introduction of a new product less risky and more predictable in terms of this product’s further performance.
A more advanced Facial Recognition app, capable of identifying and measuring human emotions, can help you predict the sales of a product you want to introduce. You can order and expose only a very limited quantity of such a product and use it as a trial balloon. Without a Facial Recognition app in place, the quantity you would have to order (especially, if it deals with multiple variations of the same product) would have to be much larger.
Cross-selling is one of the provenly more efficient techniques for achieving a sales increase. The Facial Recognition technology can enhance one of the more frequently used Cross-Selling Marketing vehicles, employed by companies that run chains of physical stores, - Basket Analysis.
With a Face Recognition app, sophisticated enough to support this, you can get detect the covert relationships that exist between the various products and that can be harnessed to boost those products’ sales. In plain talk, if you have Product A and Product B, you can determine whether placing of these products next to or in the vicinity of one another can help achieve a sales increase. Similar to this, it is possible to identify products that, when placed together, seem to antagonize customers.
In principle, one can use Big Data, Data Mining and some other means of Artificial Intelligence to achieve the same ends. However, a Facial Recognition app can facilitate this process quite a bit, and, even, take it a notch higher. It can allow you to capture more complex, one-to-many relationships by not only enabling you to glance directly into the baskets and carts of your customers, but also by linking the contents of these baskets and carts to your different buyer personas.
In a nutshell, you can identify your visitor’s age and sex, follow them around the store, identify their buying patterns, take stock of how many of your visitors meet the description of this buyer persona, and, if it appears worthwhile to you, arrange your products in such a way, that this will encourage this part of your audience to buy more or will just keep them better satisfied.
Launching a New Product Overseas
If you are mulling over launching a product on an overseas market, and pricing this product seems to be difficult due to the absence of analogous products there, killing two birds with one stone seems like a possibility in this case. You can arrange for the product being exposed in several instances and in several suitable selling environments, and then gauge both your potential customer’s overall reaction and their reaction to the price tag you will put on.
Incidentally, gaining an insight into your audience’s future reaction to you marking up your prices sometime in the near offing can also be an entirely feasible option.
Facial Recognition in Non-Digital B2B Marketing
Surprising as it may be, B2B Marketing would be just another area of Marketing to benefit from the further rise of Face Recognition.
For example, one promising use of the Facial Recognition technology many exhibition marketers are sure to fall in love with is capturing on camera visitors to an exhibition booth, and then determining their reaction to one’s exhibit or individual products (including with a view to approaching them with an offer later).
It is possible to determine your visitors’ age, sex and the emotions your products invoke and use this information to modify your product offering or gainfully adjust it otherwise.
You can also determine which of your exhibited products is likely to be more of a success, when released. You run a carpet factory? Hook up a Facial Recognition app while exhibiting your stuff, - some of those patterns will, most probably, not catch on, and it’s better to reconsider at an earlier stage your intention to launch these ones into production.
Is All This Possible Presently, and What Does One Need to Create a Facial Recognition App That Can Be Used for Marketing Purposes?
Finally and importantly, how realistic is all the above, given the current state of the Facial Recognition technology?
Well, although some of the above uses of Facial Recognition software may sound like a bit of sci-fi or far-fetched, as the developers of an advanced Facial Recognition application, we are certain that it is utterly possible to implement all the above functionality so, that it will be able to efficiently support all the advanced Marketing functions we have mentioned.
In order to do so, you would need a highly professional and Face Recognition-savvy development team, whose composition can vary depending on the amount and degree of sophistication of the Face Recognition functionality that you want to include.
We believe that the minimum team configuration, required to develop a sufficiently powerful and feature-rich Facial Recognition application, should include 1 Mathematician (with 1-2 years of related experience, and, preferably, a good command of statistical algorithms; this expert will work on the data models), 1 Data Engineer who has a good grasp and understanding of databases, and, at least, around 2 years of related experience, 1 Business Intelligence Analyst with at least 2 years of BIA experience, and (in the event that your Data Engineer cannot double in brass as a software developer) 1 Software Engineer with good Python, С++, or Java development skills (Python being the more popular option we also stick to in our Face Recognition-related development).
Disclaimer: The present article reflects solely the subjective viewpoint and findings of the SYTOSS AI Development Team on the topics, covered herein and does not represent an advice to buy or not to buy, or use or not to use any software product or technology. The above article provides some generic information on how the Face Recognition technology can be used by businesses to improve their operations. It lies solely in your responsibility to make sure that all the appropriate laws and regulations are observed by you when you use it for this purpose.
